FOSS Cell of government engineering college sreekrishnapuram is exploring and guiding each other in open source technologies. Fortunately me and some of my friends got an opportunity to coördinate FOSS Cell. As a part of its activities we conducted meet ups once in a week, workshops etc.

To aware the students about general ideas about Free and Open Source Software (philosophy/licensing etc) we conducted a workshop on topic “FOSS , Startups and Career” by Pramode sir of Recursive labs. The workshop quickly enumerated some important FOSS tools / languages /frameworks which are heavily used in the industry. We got an idea about what start ups are, and how we can build up our FOSS skills to get exciting start up job.The response from all other participants were great . The workshop really inspired us , after the workshop the graph of participation got higher than expected. After that some evening discussions conducted about basic Unix commands and website designing, the students became very much interested to work with Foss cell.

Got an opportunity to conduct two day workshop by Noufal Ibrahim sir on topic ” Programming as Engineering”. The purpose of the workshop was to deliver some general idea about real world programming. We got some new possibilities and some ideas to think about. The workshop dealt with five main topics UNIX,Optimization,Higher order functions,Data Structures and small languages.

Day one forenoon session started with the topic UNIX.The usage of Unix commands in real world scenario were well explained by the speaker.Afternoon section dealt with optimization topic,which started with simple c program to get prime numbers. The same program was then tuned over and again and squeezed performance out of it. It was a real entertainment for us. All are really inspired and excited with the presentation of the speaker.

Day two forenoon session started with the topic Higher order function. The language used to explain this was python ,so many students got an introduction to python and new programming idiom that we are not familiar with ( usage of memoization for optimizing the code and tracing etc are new to us). The afternoon section includes Data Structures and small languages. Speaker introduced some new data structures like bloom filter etc. There was a section to do programming with memory constraints, since we are not usually asked to do things with constraints. That was new to all and got an idea about how to complete a task within optimum time along with all other constraints.

Last topic was small languages where speaker introduced two languages graphviz and Gnuplot. Participants required to draw some Debain package dependency graphs and some state machine transition diagrams using dot. After that,speaker dealt with a tiny pre-processor in python that converts a textual description of an algorithm into a flowchart. Gnuplot is introduced to draw graphs. Those were very much useful in academics, we were very much excited and inspired by the workshop. As a whole the two days were fruitful and learned a lot of new possibilities , enjoyed it fully.

Other than this by collaborating with IIT Bombay, under the guidance of Raseek sir , Department of computer science ,me and Arjun V from computer science department got an opportunity to coordinate SpokenTutorial workshops . Today, SMEs and Govt. departments are moving to Open Sources like Linux OS. Students with FOSS knowledge will have an edge in the job market. They can also become entrepreneurs and use Open Source Software in their businesses, saving money vs., if they were using commercial software.The Spoken Tutorial project is about teaching and learning a particular FOSS (Free and Open Source Software). The response was great from the participants and many got a good exposure to FOSS technologies after some SpokenTutorial workshops.

The main purpose of FOSS Cell is to bring together students and users to explore, discuss and share knowledge on usage of open source software. Hope FOSS Cell activities will continue with more discussions, meet ups, workshops or events. Behind the success of the coordination of FOSS Cell activities, there exist a lot of open source enthusiasts from Government Engineering college sreekrishnapuram, staffs ,professors and many, few of them are Regu raj sir , Head of the department Computer Science & Engineering , Ali akbar sir , Staff coordinator of Foss cell, Ananthakrishnan from electronics department, Deepak from IT department and Arjun from Computer Science department. Main purpose of the cell is to motivate and inspire students to get into open source community and start exploring. Let us know if anyone have suggestions ( fossgecskp@gmail.com )

To me, photography is an art of observation. It’s about finding something interesting an ordinary place… I’ve found it has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them. – Elliott Erwitt

Had a great experience with Rails Girls one day workshop held at Bangalore .It was organized with the help of many partners like ThoughtWorks ,Nilenso , Plivo , Mahaswami.

As a student as well as newbie to this field it was my great opportunity to work with experienced persons and developers. Moreover a lot of girls from all over south India with great enthusiasm were the success of this event.

Learned a lot in one day,like how to make a web application using ruby on rails , how to deploy it etc . To understand the back end process of a web application development was completely new to me ,so that i enjoyed it fully. The hands on section was awesome such that we can develop our own application or blog or site from the scratch. Ruby is a powerful dynamic language like python ,so that it was easy to start with ruby . And the rails which allow MVC pattern so we can model our application with business rules and logic ,then view it’s output representation and control or sync these Model and the View using controller.

Rails will create the complete structure of our application development.And another thing is about the sublime_text Editor ,which is a powerful editor(like vi) for creating our application.To beautify our application we can add CSS style sheet using Twitter Bootstrap ,deploy it using Heroku Cloud service.

In between workshop there are some lightning talks from the coaches ,one of the talks that motivated me was by Venkat , who shared his learnings from the classic, The Pragmatic Programmer.

It was evident that many are able to develop application with in one day.I hope everyone can deploy their own product within few days if they get into Ruby on Rails.

Artificial intelligence is the most exciting field nowadays and I came to recognise it while research more about this area.Courtesy to university of California,their spring course inspired me to write this.Moreover we watched so many films related to AI like The Matrix,The terminator etc. So a normal human being is not at all a newbie to this area.

We all have intelligence,ie,we have the capacity to learn and solve problems,act rationally …we have the ability to interact with real world,reasoning and planning, learning and adaptation.We can relate almost all disciplines with AI. More details about it available in wikipedia.

‎ Our brain which is complicated than we thought,so yes we can expect computers with as many basic processing elements as our brain in the near future.We can google a lot of success stories like chess playing ,is a classic AI problem,and is definitely well defined one.We need to be aware of many basic things before get into this area.Some are discussed here:

Can computers talk?Speech synthesis,which translates text to phonetic form and use pronunciation rules to map phonemes to actual sound.But it has many difficulties like lack of naturalism(some systems handle this properly),emphasis,emotion etc are much harder,ie,humans understand what they are saying – machines don’t. Like speech synthesis,recognition of human speech is much more difficult.Since speech is continuous,have large vocabularies, background noise etc After recognition do you think Computers can understand speech:No, much of what we say is beyond the capabilities of a computer to understand at present.

While coming to the point learning and adaptation,,it is YES !! Consider a computer learning to drive in a freeway, we can teach it what to do(rules and all).The area Machine learning (search for more details) allows computer to learn to do things without explicit programming,these are all conclude that computers can learn and adapt,when presented with information in the appropriate way. Now lets deal with “see”,can computers see?Humans can effortlessly recognize objects,then why visual recognition a hard problem to machines.Mostly the conclusion to this part is NO,computers can only “see” certain types of objects under limited circumstances. But in case of certain constrained problems like face recognition, it is YES. This is little more hard for machines that to plan and make optimal decisions.For that it needs intelligence,which involves solving problems and making decisions and plans.What makes planning hard? It is of course of the reason that the world is not predictable so AI system only successful in constrained planning problems.We can conclude that real-world planning and decision making is still beyond the capabilities of modern computers.

AI can be modelled in different ways like exactly how humans actually think,act ,…Do you think that it is important that an intelligent system act like a human?For thinking like humanly we need a cognitive approach:try to get “inside ” our minds.Problem is that we don’t behave rationally,so reverse engineering is hard to do.And the funny thing is that brain’s hardware is very different to a computer program.

The most seen implementation in these years is Robots and AI. Both terms are hard to define.Some modern robots have the ability to learn in a limited capacity.You can get a lot of articles,inspiring stories/ experiences related to this area in web.It is really interesting to connect how and why we learn and think, and experimenting these ideas using robots.

Many research problems remaining in this AI area and we can expect more intelligent systems in the near future.!

NoSQL databases get a lot of press coverage, but there seems to be a lot of confusion surrounding them, as in which situations they work better than a Relational Database, and how to choose one over another. This talk will give an overview of the NoSQL landscape and a classification for the different architectural categories, clarifying the base concepts and the terminology, and will provide a comparison of the features, the strengths and the drawbacks of the most popular projects (CouchDB, MongoDB, Riak, Redis, Membase, Neo4j, Cassandra, HBase, Hypertable)